Book review: Jan Mieszkowski on Christian Ingrao’s “Believe and Destroy”

Jan Mieszkowski on Believe and Destroy
The Banality of Intellect: Christian Ingrao’s “Believe and Destroy”
July 21st, 2013

WHO'S AFRAID OF THE INTELLECTUALS? Perhaps it’s the same people who can’t get enough of them. Brad Pitt may have been the leading man in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), but it was Christoph Waltz as SS Colonel Hans Landa, “The Jew Hunter,” who stole the show. From the film’s opening scene, Landa is an ambiguous figure, an urbane dandy possessed of great cunning and a remarkable facility with languages yet prone to the exaggerated showmanship of a buffoon. While the pleasurably unnerving spectacle of the evil genius/jester is a venerable trope, Landa complements his campy behavior with the sober declaration that he is far too intelligent to be a true believer in the National Socialist cause and should simply be regarded as a careerist trying to excel at his job. “I’m a detective. A damn good detective,” he tells his American adversaries when they taunt him with his ominous nickname. “Finding people is my specialty. So naturally, I worked for the Nazis finding people. And yes, some of them were Jews.”

Landa is a comic figure, of course, but it is not clear whether he is meant to lampoon the incoherence of our ideas about the Nazis or the vanity of intellect itself. The instability of his persona is a reminder that the study of Hitler’s Germany and the Holocaust is still haunted by questions about what kind of people could perpetrate such unspeakable crimes. One might presume Nazism and intellectualism to be incompatible. In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), Hannah Arendt notoriously declared that Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief organizational engineers of the Holocaust, was an obedient functionary rather than an evil monster and had “no insane hatred of Jews.” “Neither perverted nor sadistic,” Eichmann was rather, Arendt argued, “terribly terrifyingly normal.” For Arendt, the key to understanding Eichmann’s behavior lies in his “quite authentic inability to think.” Unable to grasp what anyone else’s viewpoint might be — having read, Arendt muses, no more than one or two serious books in his life — Eichmann was condemned to the oblivion of obtuseness. This supercilious judgment is often held up as proof of Arendt’s intellectual elitism. Would she, one wonders, have taken a cosmopolitan Nazi like Landa more seriously?

In fact, Arendt was well aware that there was a place for the thinking man in the Third Reich. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she goes out of her way to observe that the heads of the Einsatzgruppen, the paramilitary death squads of the SS that conducted mass killings on the Eastern front, were members of an intellectual elite. How did these men, who did not, unlike Eichmann, suffer from a “lack of imagination,” become an integral part of a sustained genocidal operation of unparalleled scale? The Belgian historian Christian Ingrao’s Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine attempts to answer this question.

In the 1990s, a high-profile debate took place between historians Christopher R. Browning and Daniel J. Goldhagen about the participation of “ordinary” Germans, people with no party affiliation and little or no ideological indoctrination, in the Holocaust. In Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992), Browning looked at a unit of middle-aged working-class men and concluded that their willingness to carry out orders to execute Jews was proof of their respect for authority and the power of peer pressure, and not evidence of deep-seated anti-Semitism. Four years later, in Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996), Goldhagen vehemently contested this conclusion, arguing that an “eliminationist anti-Semitism” was a cornerstone of German culture and crucial for understanding the readiness of individuals such as Browning’s policemen to slaughter civilians. Interest in this dispute was heightened by an exhibition organized by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research entitled “War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941–1944,” which toured German and Austria from 1995 to 1999. It made a strong case that the German army was actively involved in the planning and implementation of genocide and was not, as many had presumed, a passive bystander to the crimes of the SS.
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FULL TEXT AT:
http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=1881&fulltext=1&media=#article-text-cutpoint